Listening includes watching. Do the words match the body language? If they’re different, what does the body language tell us that the words do not?

I’ve been watching the president’s hands lately. He’s doing something different with them. With palm facing the rest of the world, his fingers are spread apart, as when one pushes someone or something away. Other times they seem to be waving something away.

There are fewer closed circles with pointed fingers, although they still appear at moments that are just as telling as his facial expressions.

Every one of us is a community of voices from the past — the community of DNA and family culture — and it is not unusual for the voice of a father to shout in a son’s ear even at the age of 71.

When one grew up in the shadow of a father who had been arrested and discharged, rightly or wrongly alleged to have marched with the KKK, and years later had been investigated by a U.S. Senate committee for wartime profiteering and by the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for civil rights violations, what is the son to say and do following the nation’s focus on Charlottesville, Virginia?

Publicly slap his father, give him the back of his hand? Defend him by feuding again with the “faux media” that wrongfully accused his innocent father of being a KKK marcher and white supremacist? Push the rest of the world away from the family whose patriarch’s reputation as a tenant landlord drew the scornful attention of Woody Guthrie?

Only Donald or members of his closest family can tell us. But, like most families, this one knows how to keep its secrets.

For the nation’s sake and for his, one might pray and hope that those within Mr. Trump’s closest circle — not the circle of his public persona of closed certainty, but the intimate circle of those who him best and love him — will take the President’s hand the way a mother takes the hand of a frightened child and walk him to Trump Tower . . . or to a hospital where he can get the care he needs.

Introduction: Today we share this essay by John Miller (“the OLD Philosopher”), pastor of the Chapel without Walls, Hilton Head, South Carolina, U.S.A.

“THE GUARANTOR OF ‘AMERICA SECOND'” or: “How Much Time Will It Take, and How Much Time Should He Be Given?”, June 7, 2017

For the past few weeks I firmly resolved both as a preacher and as a citizen to refrain from directly addressing vital issues prompted by the actions or statements of the President of the United States. However, as both Isaiah (62:1&6 and 64:12) and Jeremiah (4:19) said, I can no longer keep silent.

Almost immediately after being sworn into office, the President made an executive order greatly inhibiting immigration and travel to the United States by anyone from Muslim-majority nations. That was immediately struck down by two federal courts, and the Supreme Court is about to render its decision regarding the constitutionality of his action.

Then President Trump proposed to revoke and to reform the Affordable Health Care Act. The details were sparse, but the intent was there: a major tax break for the very wealthy, higher insurance premiums for many, fewer people would be covered who had pre-existing conditions, and eventually, depending on whose numbers you choose to believe, from twenty to fifty million additional Americans, in addition to those already not covered, would lose their health insurance altogether. It was dismaying. Yet it was unashamedly touted as health care reform.

Then tax reform. There would be fewer tax brackets than previously, and all taxes would go down. The biggest advantage would go to the wealthiest Americans. Millions of Americans would have to pay only 15% in taxes on their income, because they could incorporate themselves as individuals and pay the 15% corporate tax instead of the individual tax. For many taxpayers, that would lower their taxes by more than half. But again, very few details were offered.

Neither health care reform nor tax reform has gone anywhere in Congress. It is not only because of Democratic opposition; many Republicans are also opposed. How can anyone vote on something which is not clearly spelled out? Because most of the White House staff are political novices, they have no idea of how to negotiate the inscrutable but essential process of getting legislation passed. The President attempts to manage them by threatening to fire staff members. After all, he did that each week on his reality television show.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Peggy Noonan, the longtime Republican insider, wrote, “It is absurd to think the president can solve his problem by firing his staff. They are not the problem. He is the problem. They’re not the A-Team, they’re not the counselors you’d want, experienced and wise. They’re the island of misfit toys. But they could function adequately if he could lead adequately.”

Charles Krauthammer is a longtime conservative columnist. He was unrelenting in his attacks on Donald Trump during the Republican presidential primaries. A few weeks after Mr. Trump was elected, Krauthammer wrote, “With near unanimity, my never-Trump friends confess a sense of relief. It could have been worse….Admittedly, this is a low bar. And this is not to deny the insanity, incoherence and sheer weirdness emanating daily for the White House, with which we’ve all come up with our own coping techniques. Here’s mine: I simply view President as the Wizard of Oz. Loud and bombastic. Nothing behind the screen – other than the institutional chaos that defines his White House and the psychotic chaos that governs his ever changing mind.”

These are not the opinions of dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. These are lifelong Republicans writing these sentiments.

Trump ordered the bombing of a Syrian Air Force base. By doing that his plummeting ratings went up several points for several days, before plummeting again. But many citizens were pleased that the President had finally made what seemed like a sensible decision and actually carried through on it. Its sensibility is debatable.

He ordered the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb to be dropped on an ISIS complex of caves in eastern Afghanistan. He approved a shipment of arms to a group of Kurdish rebels in Turkey, despite the strong objections of the Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The US has tried to keep a strong relationship with the increasingly autocratic Erdogan for years, because Turkey has been one of our strongest allies since the Korean War. That did not deter our President from taking an arbitrary action which greatly peeved Erdogan.

Diplomacy does not seem to be one of the President’s long suits. Still, it is surprising the President forged ahead to take a step he should have known would anger Erdogan. Despite that, he seems to relate better to dictators than to democratically-elected heads of state. But no one can predict what he will do, or why he will do it.

Trump attempted to prevent any tourists or immigrants entering our country from several Muslim nations where terrorists and terrorism are in abundance. Many of these are refugees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in which American troops have been engaged for years. Most of these particular refugees also supported our side in those conflicts. If they are not admitted into the US, some of them will surely be killed by our enemies in these wars. But because they are Muslims, and because they were born in Muslim states where terrorists find refuge, they are prevented from applying for asylum in America. It makes no sense.

In late May the Secretary of State announced that the State Department would be breaking a two-decades-long tradition of holding a reception in Foggy Bottom to mark the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Mr. Trump considers radical Islam to be our primary enemy, as he has often stated, and he seems quickly to have acquired an extraordinary skill in creating many other radical Muslims.

The President insisted that General Michael Flynn become his National Security adviser, despite strong objections from many quarters, including Republicans in Congress. Within fifteen days Flynn was fired because of allegations over improper contacts with the Russian government prior to and after the presidential election.

Having complimented FBI director James Comey on his handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation regarding the Bengazi attack and her email problems, the President fired Mr. Comey within weeks of his compliment when the director apparently refused to stop the investigation into the growing instances of the so-called Russian Connection with the President. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump has gained the reputation of man who threatens to end or who actually ends the employment of many high-level government officials. He is a first-class firer.

It is bruited that life in the Trump administration feels secure for almost no one, save for family members. Now, even they, or at least one of them, may be in jeopardy.

The President hailed his first trip abroad as a great success. He met with members of the Saudi leadership, with Benyamin Netanyahu in Israel, and with the Pope. When he got to the NATO meeting, he managed to alienate nearly every head-of-state of every western liberal democracy gathered there. Even to hint that the US might be less committed to the major alliance in which we have been a signatory since the end of World War II is a huge military and diplomatic blunder. But he did that with no hesitation. The looks on the faces of his international counterparts spoke volumes of how very negatively his remarks were received.

A week later, after having previously alerted the press that after giving climate change more thought, he would soon be making an announcement about the Paris Accord on Climate Change. And shortly thereafter the President indeed made his statement before a collection of sycophants. Previously there were only two nations in the world which had refused to affirm the Paris Accord: Syria and Nicaragua. Now, by his action, he rescinded the American official commitment. “So we’re getting out,” he proudly declared. But then, to honor the title of his book, he added, “We will start to negotiate, and we’ll see if we can make a deal that’s fair.”

There is no way to minimize the massive damage of the President’s speech at the NATO summit and his remarks on the lawn of the White House. His impetuous, ill-considered words are disastrous for American foreign policy. NATO was the main means of containing Soviet aggression from 1945 to 1989. It has held the line against Russian aggression from the time Putin succeeded Yeltsin as leader of Russia to the present.

As for the Paris Accord, it was never envisioned as a panacea in guaranteeing planetary environmental health. But it was widely accepted as an enormous step in the right direction. Now one unpredictable and misguided man may have erased the efforts of hundreds of diplomats to garner widespread agreement to move forward, if only in small increments. And by his impetuosity, he may also encourage other nations to back out.

*****

From the earliest days of his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency, Donald Trump trumpeted “America First” as his campaign motto. As President, he has persisted in maintaining that stance.

Trump has often stated that he wants an emphasis on American jobs, American products, and American power. Overtly and covertly, he turned away from internationalism in trade and diplomacy to unvarnished nationalism.

It is ironic that our President insists on “America First” as our national and international policy. The irony is that unless his policies are reversed, and quickly, we shall inevitably become “America Second.”

In only a few months, three of his pronouncements have especially eroded America’s position as Number One in the world. His attempt to ban Muslim tourists and immigrants, his thumbing his nose at NATO, and his cavalier removal of the United States from the Paris Accord have all had the unavoidable effect of elevating China into the world’s Number One position.

China, under the adroit if also autocratic leadership of Xi Jinping, has taken many long strides economically in the past few years. Their GDP has grown geometrically. Since Deng Shiaopeng led the Middle Kingdom from Maoist ideological communism into state-managed capitalism in the 1960s, China has quickly moved into second place in the world economy. Now, courtesy of the major mistakes of Donald Trump, it could be argued that suddenly China has politically moved into the Number One position. Trump has effectively knocked us out of that position all by himself.

Clearly the President never intended to do that. But just as clearly, he gave no thought to the results of the Muslim immigrant ban, the deliberate undermining of NATO, and the American removal from the Paris Accord. Donald Trump does not carefully calculate the results of anything he does; he just does it, on impulse.

*****

Elections in democracies are, by definition, democratic. Ultimately the people rule, by means of their votes. However, in the USA, the Electoral College rules, but that is the topic of another essay. By the uniquely American constitutional compromise of its Constitution, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, even if he received three million fewer votes than his chief opponent.

After the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama said, with an uncharacteristic gloat, “Elections have consequences.” Nevertheless, no one could have adequately imagined the unintended consequences of the 2016 American presidential election.

It is constantly evident that the President’s actions are still approved by the great majority of his political “base.” It is less evident that other Republicans, particularly Republican Members of Congress, are becoming increasingly alarmed by the President’s capricious and sometimes outrageous behavior. Nonetheless, recently more notable Republican office-holders have been willing to speak out against some of the more clearly egregious actions Mr. Trump has taken as President.

It is not possible for any of us to have a detailed knowledge of every American presidency. But surely no previous President has ever begun his time in office under such a cyclone of controversy as has this President. Everyone other than the most dedicated of Trump supporters would have to admit some if not many reservations about some of the things the man has said and done.

Because of who Donald Trump is, and because of who he very likely shall continue to be, he has thrust America into a totally uncharted situation in our history. If advisors were able to deter him from his impulsive behavior, it certainly would have happened by now. But they cannot and it shall not.

We are in the midst of a unique constitutional crisis in our national history. There is nothing thus far that warrants an impeachment trial of the President. But demands for impeachment increase by the week. The demands themselves add to the gravity of our constitutional crisis, because what is demanded cannot come to pass under current conditions.

There are three “Russian Connection” investigations presently underway, the two in the two Houses of Congress and the special one by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. If any of these probes quickly turns up evidence of any “high crimes and misdemeanors” (the constitutional necessity for even contemplating impeachment), then an impeachment trial could quickly begin. Such a rapid discovery of irrefutable evidence, however, is quite improbable. By its very nature, impeachable evidence is difficult to obtain.

In the meantime, the national dis-ease grows. Most who supported Mr. Trump from the early stages of his campaign continue to support him, and apparently very few have fallen away. Many of those who were neutral about him remain neutral, though some have openly begun to question or even to denounce him. Those who were viscerally opposed to him since late 2014 are even more opposed in mid-2017. Politically the American people are fraying very badly.

John Gartner is a practicing psychologist who has taught in the Department of Psychiatry of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for nearly thirty years. He has founded an organization which includes hundred of mental health professionals. The group is called Duty to Warn.

Dr. Gartner wrote a recent article in USA Today. It was entitled “Diagnosis: Malignant Narcissism.” Here are two paragraphs from his startling monograph.

“Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Erich Fromm, who invented the diagnosis of malignant narcissism, argues that it ‘lies on the borderline between sanity and insanity.’ Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg defined malignant narcissism as having four components: narcissism, paranoia, anti-social personality and sadism. Trump exhibits all four….

Some say it is unethical to dare to diagnose the president, but hundreds of mental health professionals have come together to found Duty to Warn. We believe that just as we are ethically and legally obligated to break confidentiality to warn a potential victim of violence, our duty to warn the public trumps all other considerations.”

These are extremely serious allegations. Professional mental health experts would be very hesitant to affirm such statements unless they were truly convinced of their accuracy.

Countless Americans are gravely concerned about the behavior of our President. The longer they remain silent, the more likely it is that behavior shall continue unabated. Political caution may incur incalculable damage as long as caution is the national modus operandi. How long will it take, and how much time should he be given?

At the present time, there is probably nothing that can be done to deflect the President from impulsive and disastrous tendencies. But sensibility should tell us that it is no longer either acceptable or wise to remain silent.

An enormous public outcry for the President to resign will only heighten the crisis. A man of his stubborn temperament will never resign. But also to say nothing only further encourages more of his outrages. We are faced with a massive political dilemma.

The President has had more than enough time to learn the essentials of statecraft. He has proven himself incapable of learning even the most elementary of lessons. The American people at large do themselves no service by continuing quietly to give the leader of our nation more time to conduct himself properly in his office. By now it is evident that shall never happen.

The presidency of Donald J. Trump has become a carbuncle boil on the American body politic. Until it is lanced, the problem will only get worse. Who does the lancing and when and how it is done are the questions that shall vex us until something is done.

Shall it be the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution that solves our dilemma? How shall the boil be cured? How shall the republic be saved?

Everyone of good will has a duty to join the chorus of alarm. But what shall result from the growing turmoil is anyone’s guess.

John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.

Donald Trump is not fit to be President of the United States of America, a clear and present danger to a constitutional republic and the world itself.

Whatever the reason(s) for his un-precedented un-presidential behavior — irrationality resulting from mental illness, character disorder(s) or early-onset dementia, or a calculated political strategy to destroy government itself, or something else — he has proven repeatedly that he is unfit to occupy the Oval Office.

Terse tweets are not the way presidents communicate, especially when the tweets rip a phrase out of context to rip into the Mayor of London when the moment calls for support. Especially when he insists on calling his travel ban a ‘ban’ after his own Department of Justice lawyers have chosen to use different wording, knowing that the word ‘ban’ would kill the case before the Supreme Court as clearly un-Constitutional. Especially when Mr. Trump, with no apparent reason, suddenly calls for the privatization of air-traffic control, the latest step in the systematic dismantling of government.

Whether Mr. Trump’s apparently erratic behavior results from a character disorder over which he has no control or some other mental impairment or whether it results from the illlogic in an apocalyptic view like that of Steve Bannon should not affect the conclusion that he is not fit for the most public and most powerful of the world’s public offices.

Thursday, June 8 the fired former Director of the FBI, James Comey, will testify before the U.S. Senate, drawing world-wide attention for his testimony’s potential consequences for the future of the Trump presidency. Whatever Mr. Comey has to say Thursday, the world can be certain that twitter shots will be fired from the White House. Leaders of America’s closest allies in England, France, and Germany will be watching and wondering whether members of Congress will honor their oaths to defend the Constitution of the Unites States of America by setting in motion impeachment proceedings against a rogue president of its own majority party.

These days I get pretty angry and it’s not pretty! I’m in need of a good meditation. Like this one.

“We have the wrong perception that we are separate from the other…. So in a way Trump is a product of a certain way of being in this world so it is very easy to have him as a scapegoat. But if we look closely, we have elements of Trump in us and it is helpful to have time to reflect on that.” – Brother Phap Dung, quoted in “A Zen Master’s Advice on Coping with Trump,” Huffington Post.

It gives reason for the likes of me (or is it “I?) to stop and look within as well as out.

It was just 13 months ago – Feb. 16, 2016 – that Pope Francis made news in Mexico after then candidate Donald Trump spoke of building a wall and making the Mexican government pay for it.

After saying Mass at the Mexican-U.S. border in February, the kindly Pope who named himself after Francis of Assisi, the advocate for the poor who prefers the Vatican guest house to the Pontiff’s palatial quarters, offered his view of the Christian life:

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.”

Francis’s statement has firm roots in Christian Scripture and the tradition. Ambrose (c. 340 – 397), Bishop of Milan, one of the four early Doctors of the Church, for instance, declared that “giving to the poor was repayment of resources bestowed on everyone equally by the Creator but which have been usurped by the rich.”

It’s not just a matter of charity. It’s a matter of economic justice.

In a June 28, 2016 CNN interview candidate Mr. Trump said that, compared to the fortune the Mexicans are making off the the U.S., paying for a wall “is a tiny little peanut compared to that. I would do something very severe unless they contributed or gave us the money to build the wall.”

Today the billionaire candidate who promised “something very severe” if Mexico didn’t “give us the money to build the wall” is President of the United States and the Pope is still the Pope. Mexico has refused to pay for the wall. The President’s proposed budget includes money for the wall while cutting funding for programs on which low and middle-income Americans depend and funding for the State Department, the builder of diplomatic bridges among nations like Mexico and the United States.

As the President spends his weekend at Mara-Larg-O with the bill sent to the tax-payers, I recall Francis’s response to Mr. Trump’s criticism. “At least I am a human person,” he said, adding that, as for being a pawn of the Mexican government, he’d leave that “up to your judgment and that of the people.”

The judgment was made on November 8, 2017. Four months later it feels like years.

Saturday morning should have started with a hot breakfast, but it didn’t. The President woke up tweeting over-the-top accusations against his predecessor, whose legitimacy (“not born in the U.S.A.”) he had spent a fortune to undermine, the black one whose two terms were without scandal. Suddenly, before breakfast arrived, the former President had become Nixon and Watergate and all things “sick” and “bad”.

Bugged by President Trump’s outrageous claims, FBI Director Comey immediately demanded that the Justice Department issue a statement that President Trump’s claim about Trump tower being bugged has no basis in fact. The Justice Department, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions whose unexpected recusal from the Justice Department’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election had just infuriated the President, denied the FBI Director’s request.

The President is out of control – his own or anyone else’s. His fears, imagination, and impulses control him. Someone in the White House needs to tell the White House Chef to bring him his favorite breakfast at 5:00 a.m. before he turns the world upside down with over-the-top conspiratorial tweets or, instead, uses the nuclear codes to one-up Kim Jong Un.

Monday, March 6, the six Monday of A.T.* 1, the whole world depends on the White House Chef and kitchen.

If the choice in the 2016 Presidential election had been between Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders, I believe now, as I did then, that Sanders would have won.

What the two had in common was that they were “outsiders” to the political status quo. Both spoke about strengthening the working class, creating jobs, bolstering the economy with infrastructure investment, getting Washington, D.C. out of the Wall Street bedroom, refusing to take big donor money. Both spoke with passion. Both sometimes spoke like unvarnished straight-talking guys comfortable in the “no B.S.” Truck Stop locker rooms. They said what they meant and they meant what they said.

Bernie was the first democratic socialist since Eugene Debs to capture the attention of the American electorate. Many believe his socialist views, the opposite of the billionaire capitalist, would have condemned him to defeat in the 2016 election. I argued that, to the contrary, Bernie would have exposed Trump as a fraud, a phony whose business record proves him to be the opposite of the working class – a spoiled brat member of the Billionaire Class, a 1 % beneficiary of crony capitalism. Bernie was the straight-talking common man and woman’s candidate who spoke truth to power and presented himself as the candidate who would take back the power on behalf of a fairer society.

The straight-talking democratic socialist Bernie was and is my guy.

But listening to him on “State of the Union” yesterday, I found myself wanting to whisper into his headset: “Just let your ‘Yes’ be a simple ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ a simple ‘No’; anything more than this has its origin in evil” (Matthew 5:37, CJB).

Like the political insiders he had opposed, Bernie wasn’t answering the question.

“State of the Union” Moderator Jake Tapper’s question was simple and direct.

“Are you going to give your list (of campaign donors) to the Democratic National Committee so that you can help them become more grassroots?”

I hoped for a straight ‘yes or ‘no’, followed by an explanation, but got neither. Bernie was answering like a politician with an answer that, in effect, said ‘no’ without saying ‘no’, playing the cat-and-mouse game straight-talking truck drivers and folks at the union hall and the neighborhood bar-and-grille voted against in the 2016 election.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” said Lord Acton (1834-1902) more than a century ago. Bernie is a good man. But he was exercising his power against corruption by controlling the large list of small donors who had contributed to the campaign of the candidate whose ‘yes’ was ‘yes’ and whose ‘no’ was ‘no’. And while the DNC and the Sanders campaign engage in a political trade war over the list, the Billionaire Class that controls the DNC, the RNC and Congress, and the billionaire behind the desk in the Oval Office obfuscate reality, refusing the hear that “anything more than (‘Yes’ or ‘No’) has its origin in evil,” and contributing further to the erosion of trust and hope for something better.

It was just a “gaggle” – an informal off-camera gathering of the press. But it was another small step in the Trump Administration’s war on the press, as reported here by The New York Times.

Little by little the abnormal (alternative facts) creeps forward to become the new normal. Only a diligent “Fourth Estate” – the free press whose freedoms are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment – with full access to “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – stands between democracy and autocracy.

This is serious. Breitbart News, the alt-right news media once headed by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, was in on the gaggle. It’s enough to make a grown man or woman gag at the “gaggle” and gobble back at the Gobbler.

Every day that the White House chaos grows worse, President Trump escalates his attack on the fake news of the fake media.

As the President’s approval ratings tumble, It doesn’t take much to imagine Steve Bannon, the alt-right “news man” of Breitbart News as the key figure in the new Administration, pushing the President to get back in front of the cameras to shift the blame the media and reassure his shrinking base in an ill-conceived, hastily called Press Conference.

This morning the NYT published David Brooks’s piece zeroing in on Steve Bannon as the strategist of chaos pulling the strings behind the bully pulpit.

In an administration in which “promoted beyond his capacity” takes on new meaning, Bannon looms. With each passing day, Trump talks more like Bannon without the background reading.

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Gordon C. Stewart

I've always liked quiet. And, like most people, I've experienced the world's madness. "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jan. 2017) distills 47 years of experiencing stillness and madness as a campus minister and Presbyterian pastor (IL, WI, NY, OH, and MN), poverty criminal law firm executive director, and social commentator. Our dog Barclay reminds me to calm down and be much more still than I would without him.